There are a lot of statistical programmes that are available for use in the case of psychological research. They have multiple differences in their usage. The differences are on the basis of usage, generality and cost. The most commonly used packages are SYSTAT, SPSS and SAS. The good thing about these packages is that they have the Graphical User Interface ( GUI) that have the relative ease of use. Though they offer a lot of convenience in use, they are expensive with certain limitations of usage. It is even difficult to communicate these results to others and explain in a more literary form. A widely used approach by practicing statistician is “R”
The R project has its basis on S and S + packages and is very powerful in terms of being able to operate on one programme. R is a very useful interactive package meant for data analysis. It has 3 distinctive advantages as compared to other packages that make it more advantageous. One big advantage of R is that it is completely free; it runs on multiple programmes and clubs multiple statistical programmes into a single quasi integrated programme. R is a free to install and use software as a part of the GNU project. It gives the liberty to the users to use, modify and distribute the programme within the set limitations.
R is an integrated environment meant for data manipulation and analysis. It includes the functions of descriptive statistics and many graphical tools for exploratory data analysis. In the context of inferential statistics, R has many variations of the General Linear Model which also incorporates Analysis of Variance, MANOVA and Linear Regression.
A significant reason why R is considered very powerful is that more than 5,000 packages have been contributed to R by statisticians around the world making it useful for all kinds of research related work. This enhancing collection of packages and the simplicity with which the interaction happens between the users is perhaps the greatest advantage and exclusivity of R. To add to it, R is also an amazing programme for production of graphics.
